These milestones were well worth the two years of bootstrapping, saving and sacrificing.

But we have something even more surprising to announce:

With our limited data set of just over 1,000 popped balloons (individual automated investments) since launch, we can show that compared with holding funds directly in cryptos (termed “hodl-ing” due to a comical Bitcoin community meme), user balloons can actually beat the crypto market average, even with record-breaking highs in crypto prices. In fact, Heleum balloons beat the market average for Bitcoin, Litecoin, and Ethereum 51.5% of the time. They beat at least one of the three cryptocurrencies nearly 64% of the time. The average balloon gained 10.64%, while BTC rose 18.52%, ETH rose 3.55%, and LTC rose 12.25% over the same periods the balloons were active.

This finding runs counter to the claim by some cryptocurrency enthusiasts that it would be more profitable to just hold a portfolio of cryptocurrencies than to use Heleum. Granted, to be totally transparent, we arrive at these numbers only by comparing our popped Heleum balloons to crypto prices during the same period as the balloon flight. Comparing Heleum accounts to holding cryptos over the same period is not as profitable, as portions of the account are held safely in the user’s base currency for a few days, waiting to launch or relaunch into new balloons. Factoring in balloons that users pop manually in the course of withdrawals also yields lower results, though these of course would not be representative of the algorithm’s performance from automated start to automated finish. The most important caveat is that users will typically start out with a 50% share of the gains, with the other 50% for Heleum. All Beta users (that started with Heleum before Nov 23rd) start with a 60% share. Users can increase their share through making referrals as well, and there will be more opportunities for increased gains in the future.

These results are projected to improve over time as we develop our algorithm, eventually making it advantageous for many people holding crypto portfolios to start using Heleum as well. Specifically we’re aiming for an improvement in algorithm performance of between 2x and 5x in the next 12 months. While we already saw our mesh trading algorithm outperform traditional investments, this provides evidence that it can become a leading concept in cryptocurrency trading, and may indicate that we would have similar success bringing our algorithm to bear on traditional markets like stock market and foreign exchange trading.

Here’s a summary of how often Heleum balloons beat crypto prices since our first user balloon launches on October 10, 2017:

Heleum Balloons Beat…

Average of all cryptocurrencies

51.50% of the time

Bitcoin prices

20.67% of the time

Ethereum prices

93.55% of the time

Litecoin prices

23.41% of the time

All three cryptocurrencies

6.80% of the time

Any two cryptocurrencies

26.68% of the time

Any one cryptocurrency

63.87% of the time

And here is a link to the raw data we gathered, which may be adjusted and resampled over time as more balloons pop and as we hone our filters for greater accuracy.

We’re so grateful for all of our users and for the Uphold Team for making it possible for us to reach this point. Great times ahead!